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Lowercase Minimalists

The xx performing at the Music Hall at Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

THE day that “Coexist,” the second album by the miserabilist British band the xx, was mastered, the group’s three members — Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, Jamie Smith — went out for McDonald’s. Each day during the months of recording the album, on the way to the studio with black velvet-covered walls they were hunkered down in, they’d walk past McDonald’s and sigh, tempted by the smell but not giving in.

But once the record was done, they gave in, sitting down for a few burgers each. And then, later that day, another extravagance: shared tattoos.

Not that you can tell from a quick glance. Mr. Smith and Mr. Sim got two small X’s on their inner wrists, and Ms. Croft, an X on each outer wrist. They are loyal, not ostentatious.

Such small gestures speak loudly, like most things in the xx universe. “Coexist” (Young Turks/XL), which will be released on Tuesday, is as insular and micro as ambitious pop music can be. The group has built its own idiosyncratic musical grammar, one in which each element stands on its own and commands attention, in gothic-electronic soul songs that are sometimes not much more than collections of hushes and gasps, brought together at an oozing pace.

This is music as structural architecture, like buildings at the steel girders and concrete phase, long before anyone picks out sink fixtures or doorknobs. And yet, what the xx makes is unmistakably pop music, even absent 95 percent of the usual component parts that would usually go into such a venture. Ms. Croft and Mr. Sim are slinky if chilly singers and songwriters, always aiming for the most efficient path to feeling. And Mr. Smith glues it all together, which is impressive, given how few elements he typically works with — trebly guitars that appear to be melting in real time, a spare four-on-the-floor beat, and that’s about it.

“It was an aesthetic that came out of the only way we knew how to make music, which was live,” Mr. Smith said last month, in the bar of the Bowery Hotel in the East Village, on a damp afternoon in between area concerts.

“There was only ever three or four things that could actually be going on at the same time,” he continued. “We didn’t want to add anything in the studio. If anything, in the studio we’re always just taking things away.”

The xx is all negative space, reminiscent of how some early Rick Rubin productions were billed as “reduced,” not produced. All the parts can be heard, nothing competes for attention.

Photo

The xx — from left, Romy Madley Croft, Jamie Smith and Oliver Sim — on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan. The band’s new album is “Coexist.”Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

It’s respectful, almost ethical. This is how friends treat one another, allowing one another to be heard. In person the band members are quiet and gentle, in keeping with their music. The three — now all 23 — have played together since they were in their teens: Mr. Sim and Ms. Croft have known each other since they were 3, and knew Mr. Smith since they were 11.

When they were still in school, they would play pubs and clubs in London, gigs they didn’t tell their friends about, lest some of them actually showed up. In characteristically British fashion, the xx went from Myspace demos to winning the Mercury Prize for its self-titled 2009 debut album in very short order.

And yet the xx never became big — popular, yes, but not king-size. If you didn’t know any better, you would think the members of the xx were hoping you wouldn’t notice them. There’s the lowercase band name, and the all-black-everything style sense, and the quiet, retreating style of conversation. They leave a light footprint. On “Coexist” 9 of 11 song titles are single words, the other 2 have just 2.

They are the right ones, though, short words that evoke long sentiments: “Reunion,” “Sunset,” “Missing” and, best of all, “Unfold.”

Unfold is what the songs do, beginning as pointillist sketches and ending up as huge, blurry color blocks. Even the vocals defy clean shape. Mr. Sim is the more confident singer, with a little of the sweaty, louche urgency of Michael Hutchence. He idolizes another smooth, economical singer, Sade: “She’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

By contrast Ms. Croft sometimes still sounds shy, though her reticence is also its own creative strategy. When the two began singing, they were reluctant to do so in front of the other; their interplay still has a nervous edge.

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When they come together, it sounds almost accidental, two trucks rolling down the highway in the dead of night, side by side. It happens on “Sunset,” which Ms. Croft begins with toughness:

I saw you again

It felt like we had never met

It’s like the sunset in your eyes

Had never wanted to rise

What have you done

With the one I love

When Mr. Sim enters, it’s with just as forceful authority, and the interplay is a grim face-off, Ms. Croft’s anger rubbing up against Mr. Sim’s regret:

When I see you again

And I’m greeted as a friend

It is understood

That we did all we could

Mr. Smith is working hard here too, in his way, ensuring the backing track has propulsion but not heavy muscle. He’s a perfectionist. “He’ll spend a couple of days making a change that I won’t actually hear,” Mr. Sim said. When Mr. Smith recently moved into a new apartment, he designed the furniture to his specifications.

Photo

The band members of the xx in the East Village.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

Others have been taking notice. “I always think of the xx as what I do and everything else as what I’m able to do because of the xx,” Mr. Smith said. That everything else has included remixes (as Jamie xx) for Radiohead, Adele, Florence and the Machine and others, as well as “We’re New Here” (Young Turks/XL), an album of pastiche productions using vocals by Gil Scott-Heron.

It also put him on the radar of the hip-hop star Drake, who met with him in London. Mr. Smith played him tracks by Jai Paul and SBTRKT, both of which Drake ended up rapping over. Drake also used “I’ll Take Care of U,” from “We’re New Here,” as the base of the Rihanna duet that served as the title track of his platinum-selling 2011 album “Take Care” (Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic)

Where Mr. Smith goes, so goes the xx as a whole. “It sounds like us, us as people,” he said of “Coexist,” “like what we’ve been doing in the past year.” You can hear flickers of his recent interest in techno — it makes up the bulk of the D.J. sets he’s recently been playing — but, he insists, “we’re not looking to make people dance.” Even at its most lush “Coexist” has so few moving parts it’s almost perverse. If that means that the album becomes labored in its second half, when an existential fatigue seems to replace the careful pacing, so be it; it remains a wonderful experiment in the power of absence.

The group’s first album, which was in style not so different from the new one, had a real kinship with the British dubstep scene emerging at the time — not the pneumatic-intensity version that became American pop, but the savage, craterous low-end wobble that took British dance music and stripped out the flash. The xx’s musical strategy went hand in hand with what was almost a return-to-values idea about performance — don’t make records that can’t be reproduced live — that’s unusual in the realm of electronic music.

But from just a handful of pieces the xx fills rooms with ease. The members are restrained, never wanting to use too much of the stage, but are confident that the sound will bleed into the furthest corners of the room. It’s like a mass auditory experiment, aided by technology. “We bring a lot of different speakers with us to suit the room,” Mr. Smith said.

None of the three are completely acclimated to live performance yet. When you can see them through the haze, they still don’t look 100 percent comfortable. Mr. Smith says he’s been thinking about ways to tour without actually being onstage: “ridiculous ideas, like doing it on Skype.”

And yet fewer live shows are more resolute than the xx’s. It achieves a stillness that’s multidimensional. In part that’s because of the emotional declamations of Mr. Sim and Ms. Croft, who sing love songs, or broken-love songs, but not duets — at least, not in the sense that Mr. Sim and Ms. Croft appear to be singing to each other.

“We’re kind of singing outward, so it doesn’t matter, having that disjointedness,” Mr. Sim says. “We’re not the conventional male-female duet — Ike and Tina, Cher and Sonny.” More like Xanax and Klonopin, washed down with Mr. Smith’s cough syrup.

Each person is playing a part, staying out of the way of the others, trusting in the bigger picture while absorbed in their individual roles: three people who trust one another enough to work alone, together.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2012, on Page AR65 of the New York edition with the headline: Lowercase Minimalists. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe